27th February 2012 Archive

The galaxy – and presumably, if we’re in a normal-enough galaxy, the rest of the universe – has a bit less empty space than we thought, according to a study by the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics (KIPAC).

NEC has made a multi-million investment in its Nextep broadband network in a bid to vamp up its competitive offering ahead of the NBN deployment. The infrastructure investment is the first major upgrade for the network for a number of years but demand and opportunity afforded by the government’s Regional Blackspot’s Programme (RBBP) allowed the vendor to move ahead with upgrade plans.

Fed up with sitting next to the fat guy eating crisps on those nine-hour transatlantic flights? Well, no one's invented a way to get around that, but airline KLM has a new social scheme to get passengers sitting next to people who interest them.

China’s infamous tool of internet censorship the Great Firewall appeared to fail last week, allowing hundreds of web users in the People’s Republic to access and post comments on US president Barack Obama’s Google+ page.

Fresh paperwork uncovered in China points to an early March launch for the long-awaited Apple iPad 3 - and apparently batches are already shipping to the US from assembly plants in the People’s Republic.

Two new Android phones – and one re-announced one – are not the real story from Sony, however hard it tries to make it so. When Sony and Ericsson hooked up there was a pause as the two companies tried to make the strange marriage work. But while the parting of ways seems completely harmonious, there are clearly some things to sort out.

'In his speech [...] the Education Secretary Michael Gove appeared to accept in its entirety the argument that ICT had become little more than training in office skills and something far more rigorous was required [...] While Alex Hope's slogan "coding is the new Latin" did not appeal to some, it must have appealed to the classicist in Michael Gove' -Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC website

G-Cloud bigwig Chris Chant has confirmed the second wave of Cloud Store services will go live in April and that public sector customers will finally be able to rate suppliers, helping to shore up the flaky accreditation process.

The International Telecommunication Union's general secretary reckons the Arab Spring spate of revolutions is pretty much over, except possibly in Syria, and to keep it that way we need better-connected countries.

Japanese IT conglomerate Fujitsu is throwing its own elephant into the ring with a mashup of Fujitsu software with components of the Apache Hadoop big data muncher, which it says is better than just using the open-source code all by its lonesome.

To say that the x86 server makers are a little anxious for Intel to launch the "Sandy Bridge-EP" processors and get the Xeon E5 transition under way is a bit of an understatement. They are positively champing at the bit.

Nokia's PureView 808, unveiled today in Barcelona, boasts a 41-megapixel camera - a spec that trumps rivals' 8- and 12-MP sensors spectacularly. Naturally your humble hack had a play with one on the Nokia stand.

A survey of stress levels among IT security staff, thought to be the first of its kind, has shown that an alarming number of staffers are suffering dangerous levels of cynicism, leaving them depressed and unable to function properly.

Dell doesn't want to be IBM, like HP sometimes seems to, but it wants to be enough like those two that it can kick their asses in the data center and still be best buddies with systems software makers such as Microsoft, Red Hat, and Oracle. That, in short, was the message from the top brass at Dell's PowerEdge 12G systems launch at an event in Silicon Gulch today.